Jeffrey Mehlman (born 1944, in New York City) is a literary critic and a historian of ideas. He has taught at Cornell University, Yale University, and Johns Hopkins University, and is currently University Professor and Professor of French Literature at Boston University. He has held visiting professorships at Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley, CUNY Graduate Center, Washington University in St. Louis, and MIT. Over a number of years, he has been writing an implicit history of speculative interpretation in France in the form of a series of readings of canonical literary works.
In addition, Mehlman's numerous translations, beginning with his collection French Freud ( Yale French Studies 48, 1973), have played an important role in the naturalization of French thought in English.
A Structural Study of Autobiography was described by Tom Conley as "the first major English-language study incorporating structuralism as method and goal." [1] Revolution and Repetition was saluted by Paul de Man as "one of the very brilliant and entertaining books of the last years" (back cover) and hailed as a "tour de force" by Gregory Ulmer in his article on the "ten best experimental essays written in English in the category of ‘literary criticism’ in the past half-century". [2] Legacies: Of Anti-Semitism in France has been translated into French and Japanese and was the subject of a polemic involving the journals Tel Quel and La Quinzaine littéraire , spilling onto the first page of Le Monde , when it appeared in French in 1984. (Mehlman’s position in the book has since been vindicated in a volume by Jacques Henric. [3] George Steiner, reviewing Walter Benjamin for Children in the Times Literary Supplement, saluted in the book "a scholastic acuity and wit resembling that of Benjamin himself," hailing the "sparkle" of its "erudition and playful intelligence." [4] Finally, Stanley Hoffman wrote in Foreign Affairs of Émigré New York that "previous attempts by literature professors to tackle culture have not always resulted in works as mind-stretching and entertaining as this." [5]
He has held both Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships. In 1994, he was appointed Officer of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French government.
Post-structuralism is a philosophical movement that questions the objectivity or stability of the various interpretive structures that are posited by structuralism and considers them to be constituted by broader systems of power. Although post-structuralists all present different critiques of structuralism, common themes among them include the rejection of the self-sufficiency of structuralism, as well as an interrogation of the binary oppositions that constitute its structures. Accordingly, post-structuralism discards the idea of interpreting media within pre-established, socially constructed structures.
Roman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian linguist and literary theorist.
Gertrude Stein was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and made France her home for the remainder of her life. She hosted a Paris salon, where the leading figures of modernism in literature and art, such as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson and Henri Matisse, would meet.
"The Purloined Letter" is a short story by American author Edgar Allan Poe. It is the third of his three detective stories featuring the fictional C. Auguste Dupin, the other two being "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt". These stories are considered to be important early forerunners of the modern detective story. It first appeared in the literary annual The Gift for 1845 (1844) and soon was reprinted in numerous journals and newspapers.
Paul de Man, born Paul Adolph Michel Deman, was a Belgian-born literary critic and literary theorist. At the time of his death, de Man was one of the most prominent literary critics in the United States—known particularly for his importation of German and French philosophical approaches into Anglo-American literary studies and critical theory. Along with Jacques Derrida, he was part of an influential critical movement that went beyond traditional interpretation of literary texts to reflect on the epistemological difficulties inherent in any textual, literary, or critical activity. This approach aroused considerable opposition, which de Man attributed to "resistance" inherent in the difficult enterprise of literary interpretation itself.
Russian formalism was a school of thought literary theory in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s. It includes the work of a number of highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars such as Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Vladimir Propp, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman Jakobson, Boris Tomashevsky, Grigory Gukovsky who revolutionised literary criticism between 1914 and the 1930s by establishing the specificity and autonomy of poetic language and literature. Russian formalism exerted a major influence on thinkers like Mikhail Bakhtin and Juri Lotman, and on structuralism as a whole. The movement's members had a relevant influence on modern literary criticism, as it developed in the structuralist and post-structuralist periods. Under Stalin it became a pejorative term for elitist art.
Francis George Steiner, FBA was a Franco-American literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist and educator. He wrote extensively about the relationship between language, literature and society, as well as the impact of the Holocaust. A 2001 article in The Guardian described Steiner as a "polyglot and polymath".
The Prague school or Prague linguistic circle is a language and literature society. It started in 1926 as a group of linguists, philologists and literary critics in Prague. Its proponents developed methods of structuralist literary analysis and a theory of the standard language and of language cultivation from 1928 to 1939. The linguistic circle was founded in the Café Derby in Prague, which is also where meetings took place during its first years.
Jonathan Culler is an American literary critic. He was Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. His published works are in the fields of structuralism, literary theory and literary criticism.
Robert E. Scholes was an American literary critic and theorist. He is known for his ideas on fabulation and metafiction.
Marjorie Perloff is an Austrian-born poetry scholar and critic in the United States.
Eva Hoffman is an internationally acclaimed, award-winning writer and academic.
Christopher Ingebreth Fynsk is an American philosopher. He is Professor and Dean of the Division of Philosophy, Art, and Critical Thought at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland and Professor Emeritus at the University of Aberdeen. He is well known for his work relating the political and literary aspects of continental philosophy. Fynsk's work is closely involved with that of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, Walter Benjamin and several contemporary artists, including Francis Bacon and Salvatore Puglia.
Leo Spitzer was an Austrian Romanist and Hispanist, philologist, and an influential and prolific literary critic. He was known for his emphasis on stylistics. Along with Erich Auerbach, Spitzer is widely recognized as one of the foundational figures of comparative literature.
Dominick LaCapra is an American-born historian of European intellectual history, best known for his work in intellectual history and trauma studies. He served as the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies at Cornell University, where he is now a professor emeritus.
The sociology of literature is a subfield of the sociology of culture. It studies the social production of literature and its social implications. A notable example is Pierre Bourdieu's 1992 Les Règles de L'Art: Genèse et Structure du Champ Littéraire, translated by Susan Emanuel as Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (1996).
Naomi Schor was an American literary critic and theorist. A pioneer of feminist theory for her generation, she is regarded as one of the foremost scholars of French literature and critical theory of her time. Naomi's younger sister is the artist and writer Mira Schor.
Gian Biagio Conte is an Italian classicist and professor of Latin Literature at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa.
Françoise Lionnet serves as acting chair of the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University, where she is professor of Romance languages and literatures, comparative literature, and African and African American studies. She is distinguished research professor of comparative literature and French and Francophone studies at UCLA, and a research associate of the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She served as director of the African Studies Center and Program Co-Director of UCLA's Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities: Cultures in Transnational Perspective.